The Biden administration suddenly announced this Friday that it had completely changed its plan to ban menthol cigarettes after explaining that the possible benefits or harms to public health that a potential ban through the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) would cause needs to be weighed in more detail.
“This rule has garnered historic attention and the public comment period has yielded an immense amount of feedback, including from various elements of the civil rights and criminal justice movement,” HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra said in a statement. “It’s clear that there are still more conversations to have, and that will take significantly more time.”
According to The Wall Street Journal, the decision comes at a time when the president is not performing well among Black and Hispanic communities facing the elections next November and, as menthol cigarettes are very popular in these groups, it could be a very controversial and risky political move at this time.
The WSJ cited Mitch Zeller, who served as director of the FDA’s Center for Tobacco Products until 2022, stating that political considerations directly influenced the White House’s decision to delay the ban around this public health issue.
“The science is clear that there will be a massive health benefit from removing menthol cigarettes,” Zeller told the WSJ.
On the other hand, it is also a fact that there are critics of the ban because it could indirectly create a black market that could especially affect minorities.
For example, Representative Yvette Clarke (D-NY), who is a member of the Congressional Black Caucus, said she agreed with the Biden administration and its approach to addressing the harms that the tobacco industry caused in Black and Hispanic communities, but at the same time she was “concerned about how the enforcement of the ban could exacerbate existing, harmful racial bias in our police system.”
But other allies of President Biden, regarding the entire debate around the ban, have been critical of the federal government for stopping a measure that was promised for a long time and, in the end, was still not fulfilled months before the end of his first term.
The Democratic representative Robin Kelly, who leads the Congressional Black Caucus health think tank, expressed that she is “deeply disappointed that the FDA has chosen to abandon its established plan to ban menthol cigarettes… This is a common-sense plan which could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives.”
According to a WSJ analysis citing official data, menthol cigarettes account for more than a third of all cigarettes sold in the country each year and are purchased mostly by Blacks and Hispanics. The media reported that 81% of Black smokers and 51% of Hispanics smoked menthol cigarettes in 2020, a figure that dwarfs the 30% of white smokers who smoked these cigarettes that have been controversial for years because they are more addictive than regular cigarettes and also because of their commercial promotion among Black and Hispanic minorities.
The truth is that the ban is on hold, and there is no timeline for the Biden administration to review the decision since the Democratic president is currently engaged in a fight against former President Donald Trump for re-election.
